Murder at the End of the World

The apocalypse by asteroid is imminent. Most people have fled Japan in the hope of surviving elsewhere on Earth. Haru is one of the few people who have stayed. At 23 years old she still doesn’t have her full driving license, so she does what nobody in this situation would do, she goes to driving school. One morning she and her driving instructor find a murder victim in the boot of the car and, since the local police force consists of only one person who is closing down the precinct, the two take it on themselves to solve the case. I read an ARC of this book, so I hope the final novel comes with a huge content warning, because, due to the setting, there is a lot of suicide. I especially liked the bleak setting of this dystopian murder mystery. The translation is good, but some of the prose and a lot of the dialogue felt clunky to me. This might not be due to the translation though, but a ‘feature’ of the original work.